In all its shallow obsession with sexual and racial politics, the ever more leisurely vacuity of education also puts a question mark over identity in a more fundamental sense. In January 2009, Canada’s
Crumbs. I wasn’t aware I was an entirely different “demographic” from Barack Obama. We’re more or less the same generation, but plainly the president stands for hope and the future and I represent the past and fear.
As for “not getting the problem,” a lot of those black voters who turned out in huge numbers for Obama in California stayed in the polling booth to vote down gay marriage:16 the rainbow coalition shimmers beguilingly but dissolves on close contact—and that’s before you ask the shy Muslim girl in the corner of the classroom if she wouldn’t be happier at Lesbo High.
Still, in a broad sense Rick Salutin is correct: the demographic that is the change it’s been waiting for doesn’t want to be seen “clutching old identifications.” What a yawneroo that’d be.
For decades, western elites have been bored by their own traditions and fetishized the exotic. Obama was both the beneficiary of this syndrome and its apotheosis. He was living his own COEXIST sticker: his parents were Kansan and Kenyan, as if paired by an alphabetically minded dating agency; he was Hawaiian, and Indonesian; for white liberals he offered absolution from racial guilt, but he wasn’t one of those in-your-face types like the Reverend Al and the Reverend Jesse yelling grievance jingles all day long; he was a community organizer from the mean streets of Chicago, yet he was also by some happy if vague process an alumnus of half the schools in the Ivy League, and he had the great good fortune not to live in any of the “communities” he “organized” but instead in the more salubrious Hyde Park, a community organized by John D. Rockefeller’s money; he embodied “change,” but he peddled the same reassuringly shopworn bromides (“America, this is our moment”) whose woozy evasions liberals chose to regard as the second coming of Cicero; he was kinda Christian (albeit of the paranoid, neo-segregationist, Afro-nationalist branch) but sorta Muslim (from a Jakarta madrassah, but don’t worry, not one of the heavy-duty kind); he had a white grandmother but also an undocumented auntie served with an unenforced deportation order. If that’s not the all-American resumé for the twenty-first century, what is?
After the inauguration, my old pal Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, tweeted ecstatically: “What a speech!! Speaking as citizen of the world that was exac what I wanted to hear from an Amer Pres’t.”17
What that seems to boil down to is an Amer Pres’t who isn’t hung up on being Pres’t of Amer: that Obama can do. “People of the world,”18 he droned to his audience for his famous Berlin speech, sounding as if his spacecraft had just landed from Planet Hopechangula and you earthlings had no choice but to submit to his awesome power. In postmodern terms, he’s not as far gone as Michael Ignatieff, leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Ottawa. Previously a professor at Harvard and a BBC late-night intellectual telly host, Mr. Ignatieff returned to Canada in order to become Prime Minister, and to that end got himself elected as leader of the Liberal Party. And, as is the fashion nowadays, he cranked out a quickie tome laying out his political “vision.” Having spent his entire adult life abroad, he was aware that some of the natives were uncertain about his commitment to the land of his birth. So he was careful to issue a sort of pledge of a kind of allegiance, explaining that writing a book about Canada had “deepened my attachment to the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.”19
My, that’s awfully big of you. As John Robson commented in
Indeed. But there’s a lot of it about. Many Americans quickly began to pick up the strange vibe that for Barack Obama governing America was “an interesting sociological experiment,” too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is “the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.”
